Mozilla Festival 2015

The visionOntv & Mobile Reporter teams are at the Mozilla Festival again this year. Check out below our coverage of talks, workshops and presentations where makers, technologists and artists join together to work on new exciting tools to make the web better.

We talked to Eva Constantaras, data journalist and trainer for Internews and the World Bank. She works with journalists in developing countries (Afghanistan, Myanmar, Kenya) to help them on the ground with data skills and tools.

She highlights the risk of forgetting who is the audience for this data and the importance of bridging the gap between data supply and citizen engagement. At Mozfest, Eva is managing the “Data and Impact” pathway.

To find out more about Eva’s work:
http://www.internews.org/our-stories/project-updates/eva-constantaras-data-journalism

Georg Neuman from Open Contracting Partnership hosted a session on the benefits for government, citizens and business to open government contracts data through the Open Contracting Data Standard.

Sisi Wei is a News Applications developer for ProBublica, a non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. At Mozfest she hosts a session on the best newsgames that have come out of journalism so far, and help attendees learn about what really makes a game both fun and educational.

To find out more about Sisi:
http://www.propublica.org/site/author/sisi_wei

Need more Mozfest? Check out below our coverage from the 2014 edition

Richard King from Open Rights Group tells us about their battle against internet filtering

Making things for the closed / mobile web and making people aware of their security are two of the themes of this year’s #MozFest.

An experiment in Dr-Iconography. Where Chance Meets Art. For lovers of Wordplay and Sketching. Creator Amy Burvall talks to Richard Hering at MozFest2014

Need more Mozfest? Check out below our coverage from the 2013 edition

MEASURING THE NEWS

One year after our first chat at Mozfest12, we’re catching up with Nathan Matias from MIT Media lab on his many activities. During his session at the festival, he brought together data scientists and programmers from newsrooms around the world to talk about analytics and what really matters when we’re measuring news data.
Nathan’s current projects include “NewsPad”, a collaborative writing tool for local news reporting with Andrés Monroy-Hernández at Microsoft Research Fuse Labs. This software, still in development, aims at combining powerful features from tools like Storify, Google Docs or Wikipedia to allow people with little writing experience to contribute in a very simple way to news articles.

CONNECTED SENSORS

Did you know that 20 network connected sensor motes are scattered around MozFest this weekend? They are collecting data throughout the venue—measuring temperature, pressure, humidity, light levels, ambient noise, air quality, RF noise and motion—and the data will stream into a cloud platform.

This is the work of Alasdair Allan, scientist, author & hacker, who wants to help us understand how to build our own sensor platform and how to publish it to the web. Applications for this tech are limitless: you can start by changing how you experience Mozfest or, like Alasdair did, customize your house by analysing data from connected sensors.

Alasdair is also “fixing” the Internet of Things. Most devices are still “islands”, having all their own apps and servers. By making these devices talks to each other, Alasdair hopes to make the Internet of Things “anticipatory rather than responsive”.

OPEN GOVERNMENT

We were lucky to talk to Waldo Jaquith (@waldojaquith), Open government technologist, Knight News Challenge fellow, former White House OSTP hacker, website developer (and more). We discussed the move from open source and open government to mainstream attention and his recent work on civic tools. You can find more about Waldo’s work on his site.

HOW TO TEACH ALMOST ANYTHING

Andrew Sliwinski is the co-founder of DIY.org, a creative community for kids all around the world where they can find how-tos on 100 different areas from programming to science. Andrew is passionate about getting people with no teaching experience but tremendous life experience to run workshops in their local communities.